Flickr’s Engagement Problem May Be Too Big for Even Marissa Mayer

An utterly banal image of a Post-It we uploaded to various social sites yesterday for testing purposes. Photo: Mat Honan/Wired

Nobody loves Yahoo. But people do love some of its parts, most notably Flickr, the photo sharing site that once seemed poised to take on the world, at least until it was acquired by Yahoo, which largely squandered its potential. There was a point in time when Flickr could have been Instagram, or even Facebook. Instead it joined the ranks of Friendster and MySpace and other sites that also could have been, but never quite were.

Despite that, Flickr is still incredibly beloved — so much so that it represents a huge opportunity for Yahoo’s newest CEO. In short, who cares about the greater Yahoo whole? The real question is, Can Marissa Mayer save Flickr, the one Yahoo property with legitimate user affinity?

‬No matter what kind of upgrades its team rolls out, Flickr can’t be “awesome again” as long as it’s a ghost town.‪

‬Case in point: Sean Bonner published a single-serving site called Dear Marissa Mayer just after Mayer’s Yahoo appointment was announced. It’s a straightforward appeal to the new Yahoo CEO to “Please Make Flickr Awesome Again.” The site’s #dearmarissamayer hashtag was all over the place. Bonner didn’t identify what would make Flickr awesome, or even better than it is today. But I will: Flickr needs engagement.

Flickr used to be the world’s best photo-sharing service because it was the most likely place for people to interact with your pictures. Yet for myriad reasons — from missing the boat on mobile and real-time, to poor sign-up and sign-in experiences, to social problems — Flickr just isn’t as engaging as it once was. I suspect that’s what so many people tweeting #dearmarissamayer would like to see: engagement. When it comes to social, engagement is the killer feature.

No matter what kind of upgrades its team rolls out, Flickr can’t be “awesome again” as long as it’s a ghost town. It’s not that Flickr needs more features, per se. It’s not going to take off thanks to a great lightbox, or brilliantly displayed EXIF data, or amazing slideshow features. Those things are nice. But what makes it awesome is people.

We hunger for interaction online — otherwise why share at all? We want those favorites and comments and jokes and other human moments. We want to feel a part of something. We want to be less lonely, less bored, and less isolated as we sit silently staring into flickering screens all day. We want someone to like us, to poke us, to comment on us and, in some small way, validate our existence via software and the connective tissue of the internet.

That’s what Flickr used to do, and that I suspect people desire from it again.

I wanted to test out this notion. So at 3 p.m. on Tuesday I took a photo of a sticky on my desk and uploaded it to several photo-sharing services — Instagram, Flickr, Facebook, Google+, Twitter and Path (and you can see it at the top of this article). And just for kicks, I also uploaded it to MlkShk as an afterthought, almost a half hour after all the other platforms. MlkShk is a site with only about 20,000 users, but it’s a very engaged community. These are the results of my extremely, exceptionally, highly unscientific survey after one hour on each site, ranked in terms of interactions*.

By the next morning Twitter was at 66, Facebook at 51, Instagram at 57, MlkShk at 46, Google+ at 19, and Path stalled out at 2. And Flickr, where it landed on the site’s “Explore” page that highlights the most interesting photos of the day? 23. Perhaps more damning than the poor showing in terms of up votes was how ignored it was in real-time. It was only even viewed a total of five times on Flickr in that first hour.

There are some obvious caveats attached to my impromptu social experiment. For starters, I have wildly different numbers of contacts on each platform. And then there’s the matter of my engagement. You often get out of a community what you put into it. I’m extremely active on Twitter and Path. I’m a most-days user on Facebook, and a regular on Instagram.

As for Flickr, while I post most of my camera photos there, I make very few of them public (or even visible to my friends), and I tend to drop by no more than a few times to week. Google+ and MlkShk are sites that I tend to visit when I come across a link, but I’m not a regular user of either. And of course, while the photo was publicly viewable on almost all of these, Path is private, open only to the limited community.

But it’s not just me. When the online retailer Woot.com ran a similar test on July 12, it had similar results. The company offered its (extremely popular) “bags of crap” for sale by linking to them from its various social media presences, unannounced and one at a time, and then tracked how long it took to sell out via each platform. It ran the sales in the order presented below, and the time it took each promotion to sell out from various platforms is listed alongside the site.

“Honestly the only way I can imagine Flickr did as well as it did was our hardcore users realized we were doing a scavenger hunt, and started hunting everywhere we have a web presence,” says Woot’s Dave Rutledge. “I wish we had thought to start a MySpace or Friendster page beforehand.”

Again, it’s hardly scientific, but both tests speaks to Flickr’s engagement problem. People want it to be a place where they can interact with others again. People are begging Marissa Mayer to make Flickr awesome again because they still love it. Despite its problems and setbacks, people want to see Flickr succeed. They want something less creepy than Facebook, and more discussion-driven than Twitter to interact on. Mayer is famously product focused. If she wants to show the world what a resurrected Yahoo is capable of, Flickr would be a great place to start. ‪

‬Flickr needs to be cool. It needs to catch fire with young people. It needs Ashtons and Biebers and GaGas and One Directions.‪

‬But that’s harder than it sounds. If awesome equals engagement — and I think it does — Flickr has to reverse this trend. It not only needs its old members to love it again, but it needs new ones to join en masse. Steve Jobs didn’t turn Apple around by getting its old customers from the 80s to return. He did it by getting millions of people who had never owned an Apple product before to buy one for the first time. To succeed, Mayer has to do something similar with Flickr, and, to a larger extent, Yahoo.

Flickr needs tens of millions of new users, and it needs them now. Your parents and cousins and old frenemies from high school need to be there. It needs Shell Oil and American Airlines and McDonald’s to use it and promote it too. And most importantly, Flickr needs to be cool. It needs to catch fire with young people. It needs Ashtons and Biebers and GaGas and One Directions. Justin Bieber is a scaling problem. That’s what Flickr needs.

Mayer has to get people in the door by the millions. That’s a very, very hard trick to pull off. But it’s not impossible.

If Google Plus has proved anything, it’s that people really, really want a Facebook alternative. Flickr could be that thing. Photos are the lifeblood of Facebook. And they’re an obvious attack point. Flickr truly does meet a need. It is still an amazing place to share, archive and display photos. Sites like 500px are great for pros but likely overkill for most people who just want to, say, share pictures of a family get together. Instagram and Facebook are great for sharing right now, but the former is terrible as an archive and the latter is beset by privacy and sharing problems. Flickr really is in a sweet spot. It has great privacy controls, excellent display and sharing tools, makes a wonderful archive, and, despite years of neglect, enjoys tremendous good will.

If Yahoo can create a great Flickr mobile app (like, right now — tomorrow!), hire a boatload more people, make sign in and registration as easy as one-button click, and somehow, someway create a vital interactive experience that encourages conversations, it very well could be awesome again.

————–*To simplify the precious language all these platforms use to talk about the same thing, I’ve listed terms such as “like,” “favorite,” or “+1″ as “up votes.” I also listed how many people list me as a contact on each. So, on Facebook, for example, my number of contacts is the total number of people who either list me as a friend, or subscribe to my updates. On Twitter it’s how many people follow me, or have me in a circle on Google+, etc.